Page 177 - Roy W. Rice - CEO Material How to Be a Leader in Any Organization-McGraw-Hill (2009)

158 • CEO Material: How to Be a Leader in Any Organization

Sell Your Decision

It’s nothing if you can’t sell it. The best way to get people on board is to
involve people all along in the process. Discuss, align, and engage from
the start, and continue through the execution. You build trust when
things are risky and full of obstacles if your people feel involved and
valued. If they understand the situation and you integrate their input by
at least asking questions of them before you make the decision, you’ll get
a “we did this” attitude instead of “our chief did this.” Don’t work as an
island. No matter how good a decision is, if others don’t buy in, con-
tribute, help, and support, it will fail.

My quick or slow decisions still burden someone. If in a split-second
I decide to have our company sponsor a charity event, many people,
man-hours, and dollars are affected. It took me minutes to decide to
sponsor an event but it can take weeks or months of planning the exe-
cution from the day, time, location, down to what brand of beer to
serve. . . . Now, if some individual picks up the ball in dealing with
all the ramifications of my instantaneous decision, she or he will get
noticed and viewed as a valued internal leader.

Review what happened as a result of the decision. Follow up; get
empirical feedback. If it turns out that you’ve made a bad decision, turn
on a dime to correct it.
In decision making, Murphy’s law enters the picture, that being

■ Anything that can go wrong will.
■ Interchangeable parts won’t.
■ Self-starters will not.
■ There’s always more than one bug.
■ No good deed goes unpunished.
■ If you try to please everybody, nobody will like it.

I anticipate, expect, and am not surprised by problems. I want my
people to be the same way. I tell them to defeat Murphy. That is, the
worst thing will always happen at the worst time. I tell them to always
expect something going wrong, anticipate what might be a likely